Alfred Russel Wallace 



of his own youth. By the force of sympathy he re-lived 

 in the life of another the splendid years of early manhood." 

 The late Prof. Knight recalled meeting him at the 

 British Association in Dundee, during the year 1867, when 

 Wallace was his guest for the usual time of the gathering. 

 He wrote : 



I, and everyone else who then met him at my house, 

 were struck, as no one could fail to be, by his rare 

 urbanity, his social charm, his modesty, his unobtrusive 

 strength, his courtesy in explaining matters with which 

 he was himself familiar but those he conversed with 

 were not; and his abounding interest, not only in almost 

 every branch of Science, but in human knowledge in all 

 its phases, especially new ones. He was a many-sided 

 scientific man, and had a vivid sense of humour. He 

 greatly enjoyed anecdote, as illustrative of character. 

 During those days he talked much on the fundamental 

 relations between Science and Philosophy, as well as on 

 the connection of Poetry with both of them. When he 

 left Dundee he went to Kenmore, that he might ascend 

 Ben Lawers in search of some rare ferns. 



In 1872 I saw him, after meeting Thomas Carlyle and 

 Dean Stanley at Linlathen, when Darwin's theory was 

 much discussed, and when our genial host — Mr. Erskine 

 — talked so dispassionately but decidedly against evolu- 

 tion as explanatory of the rise of what was new. A little 

 later in the same year Matthew Arnold discussed the same 

 subject with some friends at the Athenaeum Club, defend- 

 ing the chief aim of Darwin's theory, and enlarging from 

 a different point of view what Wallace had done in the 

 same direction. I remember well that he characterised 

 the two men as fellow-workers, not as followers, or in 

 any sense as copyists. Wallace's versatility not only con- 

 tinued, but grew in many ways with the advance of years. 

 It was seen in his appreciation of the value of historical 

 study. Quite late in life he wrote : '' The nineteenth cen- 

 tury is quite as wonderful in the domain of History as in 



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